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Review of KING RICHARD (2021) (Blu-ray)

March 26, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Uncategorized 1 Comment

Grade:  B+
Sports biopic, 2021
Rated PG-13

King Richard is a good movie that our family found entertaining. But we also found ourselves wondering how Oscar-worthy it was. The film has received nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Song (“Be Alive,” by Beyoncé and Dixson).

Not your typical sports biopic, this Venus and Serena Williams story uniquely revolves around the father that shaped and micromanaged their careers.  And there’s no arguing with the results. His daughters became two of the greatest tennis players ever to hit the courts. Venus, who turned pro at age 14, was the first African American woman to rank No. 1 in the US Open era and notched seven Grand Slam singles titles over the course of her career. Younger (by one year) sister Serena won 23 Grand Slam singles titles—the most of any player in the Open era and second-most all-time. Together, they teamed to win 14 women’s doubles titles and three Olympic gold medals in women’s doubles.

So the Williams sisters’ story was certainly ripe for the telling.

With Hollywood being Hollywood, though, the screenplay is reductive. The curtain parts just enough to show the period between when Richard recognized the girls were ready for a professional coach and when Venus played her first match as a pro. Though both parents had a hand in coaching the girls, emphasized here is Richard’s coaching and the tension caused by his ironfisted parenting and management. As played by Will Smith, Richard is a character that’s admirable but not always likable. In fact, he can be annoying as hell. The more he pushes, you find yourself siding with the girls; the more he stubbornly ignores the very professionals he sought out, the more you want to shake him—almost as much as the agents, coaches and would-be sponsors who are so intent on getting a piece of the Williams’ action that they act like a bunch of overzealous Jerry Maguires (“Help me help you!”).

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Review of WEST SIDE STORY (2021) (4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray)

March 22, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater 4K Ultra HD, Musical, PG-13 rated 1 Comment

Grade:  A-
Musical
Rated PG-13

In 1961, the average American couldn’t go to see a Broadway show. But they did go to movie theaters in droves, and West Side Story was a blockbuster of a movie that surprised audiences with gang members who danced and sang in an updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set in then-contemporary New York City and featuring two warring gangs instead of feuding families. The Robert Wise-directed film received 11 Oscar nominations and won 10 of them, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Music, Best Color Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actor/Actress.

So why would anyone even consider remaking a film so lauded and beloved? On one of the 90 minutes of bonus features on this 4K/Blu-ray release, Spielberg provided an answer—several of them.

First, Spielberg said he was not remaking a film. He was making a second film version based on the 1957 Broadway play. He reasoned that if West Side Story has been performed all over the world with different casts, why couldn’t there be a second film version?

Second, he was personally motivated. Spielberg said West Side Story was the first Broadway music he was exposed to at age 10, and that he basically “commandeered” the album his parents had bought. He loved it, and it spawned in him a love of musicals. As a result, Spielberg said that all his life he’s wanted to make a musical version of West Side Story.

A third and most compelling reason didn’t come from Spielberg. It came from my college-age daughter, who, since the film’s release, has been re-watching it and playing the songs constantly. She and many of her friends liked the music and some of the dancing from the first film version, but they weren’t exactly crazy about the characters or the narrative.

Enter Spielberg, who pinpointed the biggest difference between his new film version and the original:  the 1961 film was a hybrid—part cinematic and part theatrical. He wanted to create a film that was more fully cinematic, and to do that he had to push it away from the theatrical and make it more realistic. He had to push it away from the moist-eyed spotlight solos sung in private or in closed spaces and open it up to where they were sung with active movements (and reactions) on the streets of New York. He also added small touches of realism throughout the film and created a narrative based on logic rather than the limitations of stage.

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Review of MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? (Blu-ray)

March 10, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater PG rated, Romantic Comedy Leave a comment

Grade:  B-
Romantic Comedy
Not Rated (would be PG)

When Man’s Favorite Sport? was first released, film critic and cinema snob Andrew Sarris called it “a complete waste of time,” and it’s been underrated ever since. Still, Man’s Favorite Sport? finished among the 25 highest grossing pictures of 1964, so average viewers liked it well enough. It was a simple and silly diversion at a time when the country was recovering from the assassination of President Kennedy.

It was also one of my favorite rom-coms that I watched growing up, so kids also liked it well enough. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, rom-coms were typically bedroom romps set in cities. Man’s Favorite Sport? takes place mostly in the woods by a lake, and the plot revolves around an Abercrombie & Fitch fishing expert that’s forced to enter the annual tournament at Lake Wakapoogee . . . though he’s a big fake who’s thrown many a line but never wetted one. The attraction for younger viewers—at least back then—were such non-rom-com gags as a black bear mucking things up (even riding a scooter at one point), inflatable waders that overinflate, a running gag about a toupee that looks alive, a campsite that floats away in a storm, and plenty of accidental fishing catches played for laughs.

Nearly 30 years after his quintessential screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks decided the first of three pictures he agreed to do for Paramount would be a broad romantic comedy that paid homage to his earlier classic. It would turn out to be the legendary director’s fourth-to-last film, and his last comedy. Although Rock Hudson is no Cary Grant (Hawk’s first choice), Paula Prentiss turns in a screwball performance worthy of Katharine Hepburn herself. In fact, she’s less annoying than Hepburn’s character and her deep voice and mischievous actions were a welcome change from the high-pitched, quasi-innocent Doris Day characters.

Prentiss plays Abigail Page, a PR director for a big resort on the lake, and throughout the film her sidekick is the resort owner’s grown-up daughter, “Easy” Mueller (Maria Perschy). From an opening meet-cute involving a car and a parking space that pays obvious tribute to Bringing Up Baby, the fast-talking, insecure, but determined Abby spends most of the film trying to help Roger Willoughby (Hudson) once she learns his secret . . . and trying to help herself to Willoughby in the process. Call her a more competent and less ditzy version of Hepburn’s character, while Hudson is a more befuddled and expressionless version of Grant’s exasperated character.

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Review of BELFAST (Blu-ray)

March 5, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  A/A-
Drama, comedy
Rated PG-13

I love movies. Sometimes it’s love at first sight. It was that way in 2018 when I first saw Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, and it happened again a year later with Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Now I feel the same way about Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, and it makes perfect sense: Belfast feels like a cross between those two films.

Like Roma, Branagh’s film is a loving, artsy, cinematic tribute to his home city. Filmed for the most part in black and white to feed the nostalgia, it begins in color with spectacular shots of Belfast that put to shame anything a tourist bureau could pay an advertising company to design. And soulful, start-to-finish songs by Van Morrison—arguably Ireland’s best export since pubs—help to create the deeply profound outpouring of love you feel when you watch this film.

Like Jojo Rabbit, this 2021 film also manages to combine a serious topic with humor and quirky, endearing characters—a feat accomplished, in part, because the story is largely told from the point of view of an exuberant nine year old who doesn’t quite understand everything that’s going on. There’s a boyish fantasy, an imagination at work here too that suggests the amalgam of cultural images that’s rattling around inside his head and helping to shape his world view. That’s evident just from looking at the covers of the Blu-rays, with Waititi’s and Branagh’s young boys soaring above the ground like figures in a Marc Chagall painting. Buddy’s world view is also influenced by pop culture, including American Westerns that the boy watches with extended family—intended by Branagh as a thematic and structural parallel.

In Belfast, our first glimpse of Buddy (Jude Hill) is of him playing in the streets with the other kids as parents watch or dance in the street to a phonograph record. Some children are jumping rope or playing soccer, but others, like Buddy, are having a mock battle, with Buddy wielding a homemade gladiator-style sword and garbage-can lid shield. That play gets real really fast, as a gang of Protestant thugs shows up at the end of this cul-de-sac neighborhood—one Branagh depicts as loving and communal—and starts hurling Molotov cocktails and rocks, bashing windows, and threatening people. So much for nostalgia. So much for an idyllic childhood, as Buddy needs to be rescued by his mother (Caitríona Balfe), who uses his shield not for play but to protect both of their heads from rocks and missiles.

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Review of GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE (Blu-ray combo)

March 3, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, PG-13 rated, Sci-Fi/Fantasy Leave a comment

Grade:  B+
Fantasy-Adventure
Rated PG-13

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) is the kind of film that unapologetically panders to fans of the franchise. Dedicated to the late Harold Ramis, this fourth incarnation features nostalgia-inducing cameos by stars of the original 1984 smash hit:  Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver.

That original cast appeared in a slightly disappointing 1989 sequel, but was absent in the polarizing 2016 all-female reboot starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife seems aimed at an audience of both fans who have felt like the franchise owed them one and fans of child-centered mystery-drama-adventures like TV’s Stranger Things or the newer Jumanji films.

So who ya’gonna call to direct a heavily nostalgic picture that aims to please both old and young viewers? How about Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking), son of Ivan Reitman—the man who directed the first two Ghostbuster films.

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